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About Google Book Search Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web at |http: //books .google .com/I )(+4'++-l-l-++-l'-l-++++++-l"l-*"l-t"l"l-4"l-l"l-l"l-t-l-4"l"l-l-f-l-l-f-l-x rHlLOSOFHIGftL LIBRARY I PROFESSOR GEORGE S, MORRIS, + Premmtod to tbc UnivcrMty of MichiR * i t )U % MANUALS OF CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHY. KOBHAMPTON : PRINTBD BY JAMBS STANLBY, *Jt if I f MANUALS OF CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHY. MORAL PHILOSOPHY OR ETHICS AND NATURAL LAW BY JOSEPH IIICKABY, S.J. LONDON: LONGMANS, GREEN & CO. 1888. % PREFACE. It has been observed that moral and political philosophy is the only philosophy that flourished among the Romans of old. It is a study in which the northern nations show to the best advantage. It is also a study especially valued by the Catholic Church, the great Guardian of morals, and Teacher of nations. It is a field on which the Society of Jesus has laboured, "through evil report and good report." These considerations may account for the publi- cation, by an English Jesuit and former lecturer in the schools of the Society, of a course of Moral Philosophy in English, written with studious regard to the mind of the Catholic Church, and to the teaching of St. Thomas. It embodies the substance of a course delivered for eight years in succession to the scholastics of the Society of Jesus at St. Mary's Hall, Stonyhurst. CONTENTS. PART I.— ETHICS. PAGE Chapter I. — Of the Object-matter and Partition of Moral Philosophy . . . . Chapter II. — Of Happiness. Section I. — Of Ends ,, II. — Definition of Happiness ,, III. — Happiness open to Man ,, IV. — Of the Object of Perfect Happiness ,, V. — Of the use of the present life . Chapter III. — Of Human Acts. Section I. — What makes a human act less voluntary ,, II. — Of the determinants of Morality in any given action Chapter IV. — Of Passions. Section I. — Of Passions in general . ,, II. — Of Desire „ III.— Of Delight M IV.— Of Anger Chapter V. — Of Habits and Virtues. Section I.— Of Habit II. — Of Virtues in general . III. — Of the difference between Virtues, Intellec- tual and Moral IV. — Of the Mean in Moral Virtue . V. — Of Cardinal Virtues VI.— Of Prudence . . . • VII. — Of Temperance VIII.— Of Fortitude . IX.— Of Justice 3 6 13 21 26 27 31 41 49 54 61 64 69 73 77 84 87 90 94 102 CONTENTS, Vll Chapter VI.— Of the Origin of Moral Obligation. Section I. — Of the natural difference between Good and Evil . . . . . „ II. — How Good becomes bounden duty, and Evil is advanced to sin . Chapter VII. — Of the Eternal Law Chapter VIII. — Of the Natural Law of Conscience. Section I. — Of the Origin of Primary Moral Judgments ,, II. — Of the invariability of Primary 'Moral Judg- ments . . . . . „ III. — Of the immutability of the Natural Law, and consequent impossibility of evolution in Morals .... ,, IV. — Of Probabilism Chapter IX. — Of the Sanction of the Natural Law. Section I. — Of a twofold Sanction, Natural and Divine ,, II. — Of the Finality of the aforesaid Sanction ,, III. — Of Punishment, Retrospective and Retribu- tive ..... Chapter X. — Of Utilitarianism page 109 115 126 133 144 147 152 159 164 168 177 >t II PART II.— NATURAL LAW. Chapter I. — Of Duties to God. Section I. — Of the Worship of God • II. — Cf Superstitious Practices . III. — Of the duty of knowing Gk)d . Chapter II. — Of the Duty of Preserving Life. Section I. — Of Killing, Direct and Indirect „ II. — Of Killing done indirectly in Self-defence III.— Of Suicide .... IV.— Of Duelling .... Chapter III. — Of Speaking the Truth. Section I. — Of the definition of a Lie . , II.— Of the Evil of Lying . III. — Of the keeping of Secrets without Lying Chapter IV. — Of Charity .... >i >i >i It 192 198 200 202 208 213 219 224 226 232 237 Vlll CONTENTS. Chapter V. — Of Rights. Section I. — Of the definition and division of Rights ,, II. — Of the so-called Rights of Animals . „ III. — Of the right to Honour and Reputation „ IV. — Of Contracts .... ,, V. — Of Usury .... Chapter VI. — Of Marriage. Section I. — Of the Institution of Marriage „ II. — Of the Unity of Marriage ,, III. — Of the Indissolubility of Marriage . Chapter VII. — Of Property. Section I. — Of Private Property . „ II. — Of Private Capital ,, III. — Of Landed Property . Chapter VIII. — Of the State. Section I. — Of the Monstrosities called Leviathan and Social Contract .... „ II. — Of the theory that Civil Power is an aggre- gate formed by subscription of the powers of individuals .... „ III. — Of the true state of Nature, which is the state of civil society, and consequently of the Divine origin of Power IV. — Of the variety of Polities V. — Of the Divine Right of Kings and the In- alienable Sovereignty of the People VI. — Of the Elementary and Original Polity VII. — Of Resistance to Civil Power VIII.— Of the Right of the Sword . : IX.-Of War .... X. — Of the Scope and Aim of Civil Government XI. — Of Law and Liberty . XII. — Of Liberty of Opinion PAGE 244 248 251 253 255 263 270 274 278 282 292 297 307 310 319 326 334 338 343 350 354 359 364 J^i"- b t/ ETHICS AND NATURAL LAW. Part I. Ethics. CHAPTER I. OF THE OBJECT-MATTER AND PARTITION OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY. I. Moral Philosophy is the science that considers human acts inasmuch as they befit man's rational nature and make towards man's last end. 2. Those acts alone are properly called human, which a man is master of to do or not to do. A human act, then, is an act voluntary and free. A man is what his human acts make him. 3. A voluntary act is an act that proceeds from the will with a knowledge of the end to which the act tends. 4. A free act is an act which so proceeds from the will that under the same antecedent conditions it might not have proceeded. 5. Human acts, as defined above, are the subject- matter of moral philosophy. The special light ins which it considers them is their agreement with, or opposition to, man's rational nature. That agree- B MORAL PHILOSOPHY. ment or opposition is their moral good or evil, and is called morality. 6. Moral Philosophy is divided into Ethics and Natural Law. The principal business of Ethics is to determine what moral obligation is, or to fix what logicians call the comprehension of the idea / ought. It belongs to Natural Law to consider what things are morally obligatory, or to determine the extension of that idea / ought. 7. Ethics stand to Natural Law as Pure Mathe- matics to Mixed. Readings. — St. Thos., in Eth., I. led. i, init. ; ib. la 2ae, q. i, art. i, in corp. ; ib. q. 58, art. i, in Corp. CHAPTER 11. OF HAPPINESS. Section I. — Of Ends. I. Every human act is done for some end or purpose. The end is always regarded by the agent in the light of something good. If evil be done, it is done~as leading to good, or as bound up with good, or as itself being good for the doer under the circumstances ; no man ever does evil for sheer evil's sake. Yet evil ma y be thejabjert af the will, not by itself, nor primarily, but in a secondary way, as bound up with the good that is willed in the first place. 2. Many things willed are neither good nor evil in themselves. There is no motive for doing them except in so far as they lekd to some good beyond themselves, or to deliverance from some evil, which deliverance counts as a good. A thing is willed, then, either as being good in itself and an end by itself, or as leading to some good end. Once a thing not good and desirable by itself has been taken up by the will as leading to good, it may be taken up again and again without reference to- its tendency. But such a thing was not originjtUy taken up except in view of good to come of it. We OF HAPPINESS. may will one thing as leading to another, and that to a third, and so on; thus one wills study for learning, learning for examination purposes, exami- nation for a commission in the army, and the commission for glory. That end in which the will rests, willing it for itself without reference to any- thing beyond, is called the last end. 3. An end is either objective or subjective. The objective end is the thing wished for, as it exists distinct from the person who wishes it. The sub- jective end is the possession of the objective end* That possession is a fact of the wisher's own being. Thus money may be an objective end : the corre- sponding subjective end is being wealthy. 4. Is there one subjective last end to all the human acts of a given individual? Is there one supreme motive for all that this or that man delibe- rately does? At first sight it seems that there is not. The same individual will act now for glory, now for lucre, now for love. But all these different ends are reducible to one, that it may be well with him and his. And what is true of one man here, is true of all. All the human acts of all men are done for the one (subjective) last end just indicated. This end is called happiness. 5. Men place their happiness in most different things; some in eating and drinking, some in heaping up of money, some in gambling, some in political power, some in the gratification of affection, some in reputation of one sort or another. But each one seeks his own speciality because he thinks that he shall be happy, that it will be well with him. •4 OF ENDS. when he " has attained that. All men, then, do all things for happiness, though not all place their happiness in the same thing. 6. Just as when one goes on a journey, he need not think of his destination at every step of his way, and yet all his steps are directed towards his destination : so men do not think of happiness in all they do, and yet all they do is referred to happi- ness. Tell a traveller that this is the wrong way to his destination, he will avoid it : convince a man that this act will not be well for him, will not further his happiness, and, while he keeps that conviction principally before his eyes, he will not do the act. But as a man who began to travel on business, may come to make travelling itself a business, and travel for the sake of going about ; so in all cases there is a tendency to elevate into an end that which was, to start with, only valued as a means to an end. So the means of happiness, by being habitually pursued, come to be a part of happiness. Habit is a second nature, and we indulge a habit as we gratify nature. This tendency works itself to an evil ex- treme in cases where men are become the slaves of habit, and do a thing because they are got into the way of doing it, though they allow that it is a sad and sorry way, and leads them wide of true happi- ness. These instances show perversion of the normal operation of the will. Readings. — St.Thos., la 2aB, q. i, art. 4, in Corp.; ib. q. I, art. 6, 7 ; ib. q. 5, art. 8 ; Ar.,\E^A., I. vii. 4>5- OF HAPPINESS. Section II. — Definition of Happiness. 1. Though all men do all things, in the last resort, that it may be well with them and theirs, that is, for happiness vaguely apprehended, yet when they come to specify what happiness is, answers so various are given and acted upon, that we might be tempted to conclude that each man is the measure of his own happiness, and that no standard of happi- ness for all can be defined. But it is not so. Man is not the measure of his own happiness, any more ^ th an of his own health. The diet that he takes to be healthy, may prove his poison; and where he looks for happiness, he may find the extreme of wretchedness and woe. For man must live up to his nature, to his bodily constitution, to be a healthy man ; and to his whole nature, but especially to his mental and moral constitution, if he is to be a happy man. And nature, though it admits of individual peculiarities, is specifically the same for all. [There will, then, be one definition of happiness for all men, specifically as suchTj 2. Happiness is an act, not a state. That is to say, the happiness of man does not lie in his having something done to him, nor in his being habitually able to do something, but in his actually doing something. "To be up and doing," that is happi- ness, — hf T^ 5^1/ KoX ivepyetv (Ar,, Eth., IX, ix. 5). This is proved from the consideration that happi- ness is the crown and perfection of human nature ; but the perfection of a thing lies in its ultimate act, or " second act," that is, in its not merely being able DEFINITION OF HAPPINESS. to act, but acting. But action i^ of two sorts. One proceeds from the agent to some outward matter, as cutting and burning. This action cannot be happi- ness, for it does not perfect the agent, but rather the patient. There is another sort of act immanent in the agent himself, as feeHng, understanding, and wiUing : these perfect the agent. Happiness will be found to be one of these immanent acts. Further- more, there is action full of movement and change, and there is an act done in stillness and rest. The latter, as will presently appear, is happiness; and partly for this reason, and partly to denote the exclusion of care and trouble, happiness is often spoken of as a rest. It is also called a state, because one of the elements of happiness is permanence. How the act of happiness can be permanent, will appear hereafter. 3. Happiness is an act in discharge of the function proper to man, as man. There is a function proper to the eye, to the ear, to the various organs of the human body: there must be a function proper to man as such. That can be none of the functions of the vegetative life, nor of the mere animal life within him. Man is not happy by doing what a rose-bush can do, digest and assimilate its food : nor by doing what a horse does, having sensations pleasurable and painful, and muscular feelings. Man is happy by doing what man alone can do in this world, that is, acting by reason and understanding. Now the human will acting by reason may do three things. It may regulate the passions, notably desire and fear: the outcome will be the moral virtues of 8 OF HAPPINESS. temperance and fortitude. It may direct the under- standing, and ultimately the members of the body, in order to the production of some practical result in the external world, as a bridge. Lastly, it may direct the understanding to speculate and think, contemplate and consider, for mere contemplation's sake. Happiness must take one or other of these three lanes. 4. First, then, happiness is not the practice of the moral virtues of temperance and fortitude. Temperance makes a man strong against the temptations to irra- tionality and swinishness that come of the bodily appetites. But happiness lies, not in deliverance from what would degrade man to the level of the brutes, but in something which shall raise man to the highest level of human nature. Fortitude, again, is not exercised except in the hour of danger ; but happiness lies in an environment of security, not of danger. And in general, the moral virtues can be exercised only upon occasions, as they come and go ; but happiness is the light of the soul, that must burn with steady flame and uninterrupted act, and not be dependent on chance occurrences. 5. Secondly, happiness is not the use of the practical understanding with a view to production. Happiness is an end in itself, a terminus beyond which the act of the will can go no further ; but this use of the understanding is in view of an ulterior end, the thing to be produced. That product is either useful or artistic ; if useful, it ministers to some further end still; if artistic, it ministers to contemplation. Happiness, indeed, is no exercise of the practical DEFINITION OF HAPPINESS. understanding whatever. The noblest exercises of practical understanding are for military purposes and for statesmanship. But war surely is not an end in itself to any right-minded man. Statecraft, too, has an end before it, the happiness of the people. It is a labour in view of happiness. We must follow down the third lane, and say : 6. Happiness is the act of the speculative understand- ing contemplating for contemplation's sake. This act has all the marks of happiness. It is the highest act of man's highest power. It is the most capable of continuance. It is fraught with pleasure, purest and highest in quality. It is of all acts the most self-sufficient and independent of environment, pro- vided the object be to the mind's eye visible. It is welcome for its own sake, not as leading to any further good. It is a life of ease and leisure : man is busy that he may come to ease. 7. Aristotle says of this life of continued active contemplation : " Such a life will be too good for man, for not as he is man will he so live, but inasmuch as there is a divine element in his composition. As much as this element excels the compound into which it enters, so much does the act of the said element excel any act in any other line of virtue. If, then, the under- standing is divine in comparison with man, the life of the understanding is divine in comparison with human life. We must not take the advice of those who tell us, that being man, one should cherish the thoughts of a man, or being mortal, the thoughts of a mortal, but so far as in us lies, we must play the lo OE HAPPINESS. immortal {aOavarl^etv), and do all in our power to live by the best element in our nature : for though that element be slight in quantity, in power and in value it far outweighs all the rest of our being. A man may well be reckoned to be that which is the ruling power and the better part in him. . . . What is proper to each creature by nature, is best and sweetest for each : such, then, is for man the life of the understanding, if the understanding pre-eminently is man" (Ar., Eth., X. vii. 8, 9). 8. But if happiness is an act in discharge of the function proper to man as man (n. 3), how can it be happiness to lead a life which Aristotle says is too good for man ? The solution of this paradox is partly contained in the concluding words of Aristotle above quoted, and will still further appear presently (s. iv. n. i), where we shall argue that human life is a state of transition in preparation for a higher life of the soul, to be lived, according to the natural order, when the compound of soul and body would no longer exist. g. The act of contemplation, in which happiness con- sists, must rest upon a habit of contemplation, which is intellectual virtue. An act, to be perfection and hap- piness, must be done easily, sweetly, and constantly. But no act of the intellect can be so done, unless it rests upon a corresponding habit. If the habit has not been acquired, the act will be done fitfully, at random, and against the grain, like the music of an untrained singer, or the composition of a schoolboy. Painful study is not happiness, nor is any studied act. Happiness is the play of a mind that is, if not DEFINITION OF HAPPINESS. ii master of, yet at home with its subject. As the intellect is man's best and noblest power, so is intel- lectual virtue, absolutely speaking, the best virtue of man. 10. The use of the speculative understanding is discernible in many things to which even the common crowd turn for happiness, as news of that which is of little or no practical concern to self, sight-seeing, theatre-going, novels, poetry, art, scenery, as well as speculative science and high literature. A certain speculative interest is mixed up with all practical work : the mind lingers on the speculation apart from the end in view. 11. The act of contemplation cannot be steadily carried on, as is necessary to happiness, except in the midst of easy surroundings. Human nature is not self-sufficient for the work of contemplation. There is need of health and vigour, and the means of maintaining it, food, warmth, interesting objects around you, leisure, absence of distracting care or pain. None would call a man happy upon the rack, except by way of maintaining a thesis. The happiness of a disem- bodied spirit is of course independent of bodily conditions, but it would appear that there are con- ditions of environment requisite for even a spirit's contemplation. 12. Happiness mast endure to length of days. Happiness is the perfect good of man. But no good is perfect that will not last. One swallow does not make a summer, nor does one fine day: neither is man made blessed and happy by one day, nor by a brief time. The human mind lighting upon 12 OF HAPPINESS. good soon asks the question, Will this last ? If the answer is negative, the good is not a complete good, and there is no complete happiness coming of it. If the answer is affirmative and false, once more that is not a perfect happiness that rests on a delusion. The supreme good of a rational being is not found in a fool's paradise. We want an answer affirmative and true : This happiness shall last. 13. We now sum up and formulate the definition of happiness as follows : Happiness is a bringing of the soul to act according to the habit of the best and most perfect virtue, that is, the virtue of the speculative intel- lect, borne out by easy surroundings, and enduring to length of days — ivipyeta yjrvxrj^ fcar aperrjv rrfv Aplarrjv kol reXecoTaTrfv ev ^i(p reXelcp (Ar., Eth,, I. vii. 15, 16). 14. Man is made for society. His happiness must be in society, a social happiness, no lonely contemplation. He must be happy in the con- sciousness of his own intellectual act, and happy in the discernment of the good that is in those around him, whom he loves. Friends and dear ones are no small part of those easy surroundings that are the condition of happiness. 15. Happiness— final, perfect happiness— is not in fighting and struggling, in so far as a struggle supposes evil present and imminent ; nor in bene- volence, so far as that is founded upon misery needing relief. We fight for the conquest and suppression of evil ; we are benevolent for the heal- ing of misery. But it will be happiness, in the limit, as mathematicians speak, to wish well to all HAPPINESS OPEN TO MAN. 13 in a society where it is well with all, and to struggle with truth for its own sake, ever grasping, never mastering, as Jacob wrestled with God. Readings, — Ar., Eth., I. vii. viii. 5 to end ; I. x. 8 to end ; I. v. 6 ; VII. xiii. 3 ; IX. ix. ; X. vii. ; X. viii. I — 10; At., Pol, ,1V. (al. VII.), i. 3 — 10; IV. iii. 7, 8. St. Thos., la 2ae, q. 3, art. 2 ; ib. q. 3, art. 5, in corp., ad 3 ; ib. q. 2, art. 6. Section III. — Happiness open to man. "And now as he looked and saw the whole Hellespont covered with the vessels of his fleet, and all the shore and every plain about Abydos as full as possible of men, Xerxes congratulated himself on his good fortune ; but after a little while, he wept. Then Artabanus, the King's uncle, when he heard that Xerxes was in tears, went to him, and said : * How different, sire, is what thou art now doing from what thou didst a little while ago ! Then thou didst congratulate thyself ; and now, behold ! thou weepest.' * There came upon me,' replied he, ' a sudden pity, when I thought of the shortness of man's life, and considered that of all this host, so numerous as it is, not one will be alive when a hundred years are gone by.' * And yet there are sadder things in life than that,' returned the other. * Short as our time is, there is no man, whether it be among this multitude or elsewhere, who is so happy, as not to have felt the wish — I will not say once, but full many a time — that he were dead rather than alive. Calamities fall upon us, sick- nesses vex and harass us, and make life^ short 14 OF HAPPINESS, though it be, to appear long. So death, through the wretchedness of our life, is a most sweet refuge to our race; and God, who gives us the tastes that we enjoy of pleasant times, is seen, in his very gift, to be envious ' " (Herodotus, vii. 45, 46). I. It needs no argument to show that happi- ness, as defined in the last section, can never be perfectly realized in this life. Aristotle took his definition to represent an ideal to be approximated to, not attained. He calls his sages " happy as men" (Eth. I. x. 16), that is, imperfectly, as all things human are imperfect. Has Aristotle, then, said the last word on happiness ? Is perfect happi- ness out of the reach of the person whom in this mortal life we call man? However that may be, it is plain that man desires perfect happiness. Every man desires that it may be perfectly well with him and his, although many have mistaken notions of what their own well-being consists in, and few can define it philosophically. Still they all desire it. The higher a man stands in intellect, the loftier and vaster his conception of happiness, and the stronger his yearning after it. This argues that the desire of happiness is natural to man : not in the sense in which eating and drinking are natural, as being requirements of his animal nature, but in the same way that it is natural to him to think and converse, his rational nature so requiring. It is a natural desire, as springing from that which is the specific charac- teristic of human nature, distinguishing it from mere animal nature, namely reason. It is a natural desire ip the best and highest sense of the word. HAPPINESS OPEN TO MAN. 15 2. Contentment is not happiness. A man is content with little, but it takes an immensity of good to satisfy all his desire, and render him per- fectly happy. When we say we are content, we signify that we should naturally desire more, but acquiesce in our present portion, seeing that more is not to be had. " Content," says Dr. Bain, " is not the natural frame of any mind, but is the result of compromise." 3. But is not this desire of unmixed happiness unreasonable? Are we not taught to set bounds to our desire ? Is not moderation a virtue, and contentment wisdom ? Yes, moderation is a virtue, but it concerns only the use of means, not the apprehension of ends. The patient, not to say the physician, desires medicines in moderation, so much as will do him good and no more, but, so far as his end is health, he desires all possible health, perfect health. The last end, then, is to be desired as a thing to possess without end or measure, fuUy and without defect. 4. We have then these facts to philosophize on : that all men desire perfect happiness : that this desire is natural, springing from the rational soul which sets man above the brute : that on earth man may attain to contentment, and to some happiness, but not to perfect happiness : that consequently nature has planted in man a desire for which on earth she has provided no adequate satisfaction. 5. If the course of events were fitful and way- ward, so that effects started up without causes, and like causes under like conditions produced unlike i6 OF HAPPINESS. effects, and anything might come of anything, there would be no such thing as that which we call nature. When we speak of nature, we imply a regular and definite flow of tendencies, this thing springing from that and leading to that other ; nothing from noth- ing, and nothing leading nowhere; no random, aimless proceedings ; but definite results led up to by a regular succession of steps, and surely ensuing unless something occurs on the way to thwart the process. How this is reconciled with Creation and Freewill, it is not our province to enquire : suffice it to say that a natural agent is opposed to a free one, and creation is the starting-point of nature. But to return. Everywhere we say, "this is for that," wherever there appears an end and consum- mation to which the process leads, provided it go on unimpeded. Now every event that happens is a part of some process or other. Every act is part of a tendency. There are no loose facts in nature, no things that happen, or are, otherwise than in consequence of something that has happened, or been, before, and in view of something else that is to happen, or be, hereafter. The tendencies of nature often run counter to one another, so that the result to which this or that was tending is frustrated. But a tendency is a tendency, although defeated ; this was for that, although that for which it was has got perverted to something else. There is no tendency which of itself fails and comes to naught, apart from interference. Such an universal and absolute break-down is unknown to nature. 6. All this appears most clearly in organic beingSy HAPPINESS OPEN TO MAN. 17- plants and animals. Organisms, except the very lowest, are compounds of a number of different parts, each fulfilling a special function for the goodi of the whole. There is no idle constituent in am organic body, none without its function. What: are called rudimentary organs, even if they serve no purpose in the individual, have their use in the species, or in some higher genus. In the animal- there is no idle natural craving, or appetite. True^. in the individual, whether plant or animal, there are many potentialities frustrate and made void. That : is neither here nor there in philosophy. Philosophy deals not with individuals but with species, not with. Bucephalus or Alexander, but with horse, man. It is nothing to philosophy that of a thousand seeds - there germinate perhaps not ten. Enough that one seed ever germinates, and that all normal speci-- mens are apt to do the like, meeting with proper environment. That alone shows that seed is not an idle product in this or that class of living beings^ 7. But, it will be said, not everything contained in an organism ministers to its good. There is^ refuse material, only good to get rid of: there are morbid growths ; there is that tendency to decay,, by which sooner or later the organism will perish- First, then, a word on diseases. Diseases are the diseases of the individual; not of the race. The race, as such, and that is what the philosopher studies, is healthy : all that can be imputed to the race is liability to disease. That liability, and the tendency to decay and die, are found in living; things, because their essence is of finite perfection ;, c 1 8 OF HAPPINESS. there cannot be a plant or animal, that has not these drawbacks in itself, as such. They represent, not the work of nature, but the failure of nature, and the point beyond which nature can no further go- 8. On the preceding observations Aristotle for- mulated the great maxim — called by Dr. Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, p. i. sect. 15, "the only indisputable axiom in philosophy," — Nature does nothing in vain {At., PoL, I. viii. 12 ; De anima, III. ix. 6; De part, animal. 1. i. p. 641, ed. Bekker). g. The desire of happiness, ample and complete, beyond what this world can afford, is not planted in man by defect of his nature, but by the perfection of his nature, and in view of his further perfection. This desire has not the character of a drawback, a thing that cannot be helped, a weakness and decay of nature, and loss of power, like that which sets in with advancing years. A locomotive drawing a train warms the air about it: it is a pity that it should do so, for that radiation of heat is a loss of power : but it cannot be helped, as locomotives are and must be constructed. Not such is the desire of perfect happiness in the human breast. It is not a disease, for it is no peculiarity of individuals, but a property of the race. It is not a decay, for it grows with the growing mind, being feeblest in childhood, when desires are simplest and most easily satisfied, and strongest where mental life is the most vigorous. It is an attribute of great minds in proportion to their greatness. To be without it, would be to live a minor in point of HAPPINESS OPEN TO MAN, 19 intellect, not much removed from imbecility. It is not a waste of energy, rather it furnishes the motive-power to all human volition. It comes of the natural working of the understanding that dis- cerns good, and other good above that, and so still higher and higher good without limit ; and of the natural working of the will, following up and fasten- ing upon what the understanding discerns as good. The desire in question, then, is by no means a necessary evil, or natural flaw, in the human consti- tution. 10. It follows that the desire of perfect happi- ness is in man by the normal growth of his nature, and for the better. But it would be a vain desire, and by no means for the better, if it were essentially incapable of satisfaction : that is, if there were no perfect good accessible to man which should afford him perfect happiness. But no such perfect happi- ness is attainable in this world. Therefore there must be a world to come, in which he who was man, now a disembodied spirit, but still the same person, shall under due conditions find a perfect good, the adequate object of his natural desire. Else is the deepest craving of human nature in vain, and man himself is vanity of vanities. 11. It may be objected that there is no need to g^o beyond this world to explain how the desire of perfect happiness works for the better. It works like the desire of the philosopher's stone among the old alchemists. The thing they were in search of was a chimera, but in looking for it they found a real good, modern chemistry. In like manner, it is 20 OT HAPPINESS, contended, though perfect happiness is not to be had anywhere, yet the desire of it keeps men from sitting down on the path of progress, and thus to that desire we owe all our modern civilization, and all our hope and prospect of higher civilization to come. Without questioning the alleged fact about the alchemists, we may reply, that modern chemistry has dissipated the desire of the philoso- pher's stone, but modern civilization has not dissi- pated the desire of perfect happiness : it has deepened it, and perhaps rather obscured the prospect of its fulfilment. A desire that grows with progress cer- tainly cannot be satisfied by progressing. But if it is never to be satisfied, what is it ? A goad thrust into the side of man, that shall keep him coursing along from century to century, like lo under the gadfly, only to find himself in the last century as far from the mark as in the first. Apart from the hope of the world to come, is the Italy of to-day happier than the Italy of Antoninus Pius? Here is a modern Italian's conclusion : " I have studied man, I have examined nature, I have passed whole nights ob- serving the starry heavens. And what is the result of these long investigations ? Simply this, that the life of man is nothing ; that man himself is nothing ; that he will never penetrate the mystery which sur- rounds the universe. With this comfortless con- viction I descend into the grave, arid console myself with the hope of speedy annihilation. The lamp goes out ; and nothing, nothing can rekindle it. So, Nature, I return to thee, to be united with thee for ever. Never wilt thou have received into thy bosom OBJECT OF PERFECT HAPPINESS. 21 a more unhappy being " (La Nullita della Vita. By G. P., 1882). This is an extreme case, but much of modern progress tends this way. Civilization is not happi- ness, nor is the desire for happiness other than vain, if it merely leads to increased civilization. Readings, — St. Thos., C. G., iii. 48 ; Newman's Historical Sketches — Conversion of Augustine; Mill's Autobiography y pp. 133 — 149. Section IV. — Of the Object of Perfect Happiness. I. As happiness is an act of the speculative in- tellect contemplating (s. ii. n. 6), so the thing thus contemplated is the object of happiness. As happiness is the subjective last end, so will this object, inasmuch as the contemplation of it yields perfect happiness, be the objective last end of man (s. i. nn. 3, 4). As perfect happiness is possible, and intended by nature, so is this objective last end attainable, and should be attained. But attained by man ? Aye, there's the rub. It cannot be attained in this life, and after death man is no more : a soul out of the body is not man. About the resurrection of the body philosophy knows nothing. Nature can make out no title to resurrection.. That is a gratuitous gift of God in Christ. When it takes effect, stupebit natura. Philo- sophy deals only with the natural order, with man as man, leaving the supernatural order, or the privi- leges and status of man as a child of God, to the higher science of Scholastic Theology. Had God so willed it, there might have been no supernatural at all. Philosophy shows the world as it would 22 Of happiness. have been on that h3^othesis. In that case, then, man would have been, as Aristotle represents him, a being incapable of perfect happiness ; but he who is man could have become perfectly happy in a state other than human, that is, as a disembodied spirit. Peter is man : the soul of Peter, after separation, is man no longer ; but Peter is not one person, and Peter's soul out of the body another person ; there is but one person there, with one personal history and liabilities. The soul of Peter is Peter still: therefore the person Peter, or he who is Peter, attains to happiness, but not the man Peter, as man, apart from the supernatural privilege of the resurrection. Hence Aristotle well said, though he failed to see the significance of his own saying, that man should aim at a life of happiness too good for man (s. ii. nn. 7, 8). 2. The object of happiness, — the objective last end of man, — will be that which the soul contem- plating in the life to come will be perfectly happy by so doing. The soul will contemplate all in- tellectual beauty that she finds about her, all heights of truth, all the expanse of goodness and mystery of love. She will see herself: a vast and curious sight is one pure spirit : but that will not be enough for her, her eye travels beyond. She must be in company, live with myriads of pure spirits like herself, — see them, study them, and admire them, and converse with them in closest intimacy. To- gether they must explore the secrets of all creation even to the most distant star : they must read the laws of the universe, which science laboriously spells OBJECT OF PERFECT HAPPINESS. 23 out here below: they must range from science to art, and from facts to possibilities, till even their pure intellect is bafHed by the vast intricacy of things that might be and are not : but yet they are not satisfied. A point of convergency is wanted for all these vistas of being, whence they may go forth, and whither they may return and meet : otherwise the soul is distracted and lost in a maze of in- coherent wandering, crying out. Whence all this ? and what is it for ? and above all, whose is it ? These are the questions that the human mind asks in her present condition : much more will she ask them then, when wonders are multiplied before her gaze : for it is the same soul there and here. Here men are tormented in mind, if they find no answer to these questions. Scientific men cannot leave theology alone. They will not be happy there without an answer. Their contemplation will still desiderate something beyond all finite being, actual or possible. Is that God ? It is nothing else. But God dwells in light inaccessible, where no creature, as such, can come near Him nor see Him. The beauties of creation, as so many streams of tendency, meet at the foot of His Throne, and there are lost. Their course is towards Him, and is, so far as it goes, an indication of Him : but He is infinitely, unspeakably above them. No intelligence created, or creatable, can arrive by its own natural perception to see Him as He is : for mind can only discern what is proportionate to itself : and God is out of proportion with all the being of all possible creatures. It is only by analogy that the word being, or any ^24 OF HAPPINESS, •other word whatever can be applied to Him. As Plato says, " the First Good is not Being, but over and beyond Being in dignity and power" {Rep. 509, B). 3. To see God face to face, which is called the ieatific vision, is not the natural destiny of man, nor of any possible creature. Such happiness is not the happiness of man, nor of angel, but of God Himself, and of any creature whom He may design by an act of gratuitous condescension to invite to «it as guest at His own royal table. That God has so invited men and angels, revelation informs us. Scholastic theology enlarges upon that revelation, but it is beyond philosophy. Like the resurrection >of the body, and much more even than that, the Beatific Vision must be relegated to the realm of the Supernatural. 4. But even in the natural order the object of perfect happiness is God. The natural and super- natural have the same object, but differ in the mode of attainment. By supernatural grace, bearing perfect fruit, man sees God with the eyes of his soul, as we see the faces of our friends on earth. In perfect happiness of the natural order, creatures alone are directly apprehended, or seen, and from the creature is gathered the excellence of the unseen what of his eating, drinking, and other actions that are of their kind indifferent ? We cannot call them sins : there is nothing wrong about them, neither in the thing done, nor in the circumstances of the doing, nor in the intention. Pius V. condemned the proposition : " All the works of infidels are sins." Neither must we call such actions indifferent in the individual who does them, supposing them to be true human acts, according to the definition, and not done merely mechanically. They are not indifferent,., because they receive a certain measure of natural goodness from the good natural purpose which they serve, namely, the conservation and well-being of the agent. Every human act is either good or evil in him who does it. I speak of natural goodness only. . 17. The effect consequent upon an action is distin- guishable from the action itself, from which it is not unfrequently separated by a considerable interval of j time, as the death of a man from poison adminis- tered a month before. The effect consequent enters into morality only in so far as it is either willed, that is, chosen as a means or intended as an end (nn. 2, 3), or is annexed as a relevant circumstance to the means chosen (n. 9). Once the act is done, it matters nothing to morality whether the effect consequent actually ensues or not, provided no new . 40 OF HUMAN ACTS. act be elicited thereupon, whether of commission or of culpable omission to prevent. It matters not to morality, but it does matter to the agent's claim to reward or liability to punishment at the hands of human legislators civil and ecclesiastical. i8. As body and soul make one man, so the out- ward and inward act — ^technically termed respec- tively the act elicited and the act commanded — as the will to strike and the actual blow struck, are one human act. The act commanded gives a certain physical completeness to the act elicited. Moreover the act elicited is no thorough-going thing, if it stops short of the act commanded, where the opportunity offers. Otherwise, the act elicited alone may be as good or as bad morally as the act commanded and elicited together. The mere wish to kill, where the deed is impossible, may be as wicked as wish and deed conjoined. It may be, but commonly it will not, for this reason, that the outward execution of the deed reacts upon the will and calls it forth with greater intensity : the will as it were expands where it finds outward vent. There is no one who has not felt the relative mildness of inward feelings of impa- tience or indignation compared with those engen- dered by speaking out one's mind. Often also the outward act entails a long course of preparation, all during which the inward will is sustained and frequently renewed, as in a carefully planned hurglary. Readings, — St. Thos., la 2ae, q. i8, art. i ; ib. q. i8, art. 2, in cbrp., ad i ; ib. q. i8, art. 3, in corp., ad 2 ; ib. q. 18, art. 4 — 6; t6. q. 18. art. 8, in corp., ad PASSIONS IN GENERAL. 41 2, 3; ib. q. 18, art. 9, in Corp., ad 3; ib. q. 18, art. 10, 3 ; ib. q. 18, art. 11, in corp. ; ib. q. 20, art. 4, in Corp. CHAPTER IV. OF PASSIONS. Section I. — Of Passions in General. I. A PASSION is defined to be : -4 movefnent of the irrational part of the soul, attended by a notable altera- tion of the body, on the apprehension of good or evil. The soul is made up of intellect, will, and sensible appetite. The first two are rational, the third irrational: the third is the seat of the passions. In a disembodied spirit, or an angel, there are no senses, no sensible appetite, no passions. The angel, or the departed soul, can love and hate, fear and desire, rejoice and grieve, but these are not passions in the pure spirit, they are acts of intellect and will alone. So man also often loves and hates, and does other acts that are synonymous with cor- responding passions, and yet no passion is there. The man is working with his calm reason: his irrational soul is not stirred. To an author, when he is in the humour for it, it is a delight to be writing, but not a passionate delight. The will finds satisfaction in the act: the irrational soul is not affected by it. Or a penitent is sorry for his sin : he sincerely regrets it before God : his will is heartily turned away, and wishes that that sin had 42 OF PASSIONS. never been : at the same time his eye is dry, his features unmoved, not a sigh does he utter, and yet he is truly sorry. It is important to bear these facts in mind : else we shall be continually mistaking for passions what are pure acts of will, or vice versa, misled by the identity of name. 2. The great mark of a passion is its sensible working of itself out upon the body, — what Dr. Bain calls " the diffusive wave of emotion." Without this mark there is no passion : but with it are other mental states besides passions, as we define them. All strong emotion affects the body sensibly, but not all emotions are passions. There are emotions that arise from and appertain to the rational portion of the soul. Such as Surprise, Laughter, Shame. There is no sense of humour in any but rational beings ; and though dogs look ashamed and horses betray curiosity, that is only inasmuch as in these higher animals there is something analogous to what is reason in man. Moreover passions are conversant with good and evil affecting sense, but the objects of such emotions as those just mentioned are not good and evil as such, common parlance notwith- standing, whereby we are said to laugh at a bon mot,, or " a good thing." 3. Love and hatred are generic passions. The species of the passion of love are desire and delights The species of the passion of hatred are abhorrence and displeasure. Desire is of absent good; abhor- rence is of absent evil ; delight is in present good ; displeasure is at present evil. The good and the evil which is the object of any passion must be appre-. PASSIONS IN GENERAL. 43 hended by sense, or by imagination in a sensible way, whether itself be a thing of sense or not. 4. Desire and abhorrence, delight and displeasure, are conversant with good and evil simply. But good is often attainable only by an eifort, and evil avoidable by an effort. The effort that good costs to attain casts a shade of evil or undesirableness over it : we may shrink from the effort while coveting the good. Again, the fact of evil being at all avoid- able is a good thing about such evil. If we call evil black, and good white, avoidable evil will be black just silvering into grey: and arduous good will be white with a cloud on it. And if the white attracts, and the black repels the appetite, it appears that arduous good is somewhat distasteful, to wit, to the faint-hearted, and avoidable, or vincible, evil has its attraction for the man of spirit. About these two objects, good hard of getting and evil hard of avoidance, arise four other passions, hope and despair about the former, fear and daring about the latter. Hope goes out towards a difficult good : despair flies from it, the difficulty here being more repellent than the good is attractive. Fear flies from a threatening; evil: while daring goes up to the same, drawn by the likelihood of vanquishing it. Desire and abhor- rence, delight and displeasure, hope and despair, fear and daring, with anger (of which presently), complete our list of passions. 5. Aristotle and his school of old, called Peri- patetics, recommended the moderation of the passions, not their extirpation. The Stoics on the other hand contended that the model man, the sage,. 44 OF PASSIONS. should be totally devoid of passions. This cele- brated dispute turned largely on the two schools not understanding the same thing by the word passion. Yet not entirely so. There was a residue of real difference, and it came to this. If the sensi- tive appetite stirs at all, it must stir in one or other of nine ways corresponding to the nine passions which we have enumerated. Such an emotion as Laughter affects the imagination and the sensitive part of man, and of course the body visibly, but it does not stir the sensitive appetite, since it does not prompt to action. To say then that a man has no passions, means that the sensitive appetite never stirs within him, but is wholly dead. But this is impossible, as the Stoic philosopher was fain to confess when he got frightened in a storm at sea. Having no passions cannot in any practical sense mean having 310 movements of the sensitive appetite, for that will te afoot of its own proper motion independent of reason : but it may mean cherishing no passions, allowing none to arise unresisted, but suppressing their every movement to the utmost that the will can. In that sense it is a very intelligible and practical piece of advice, that the wise man should labour to have no passions. It is the advice embodied in Horace's Nil admirari, Talleyrand's, " No zeal," Beaconsfield's " Beware of enthusiasm." It would have man to work like a scientific instrument, calm as a chronometer, regulated by reason alone. This was the Stoic teaching, this the perfection that they inculcated, quite a possible goal to make for, if not to attain. And it is worth a vnse man's while to PASSIONS IN GENERAL. 45 consider, whether he should bend his efforts in this direction or not. The determination here taken and acted upon will elaborate quite a different character of man one way or the other. The effort made as the Stoics direct, would mean no yielding to excite- ment, no poetry, no high-strung devotion, no rapture^ no ecstasy, no ardour of love, no earnest rhetoric spoken or listened to, no mourning, no rejoicing other than the most conventional, to the persistent smothering of whatever is natural and really felt, no- tear of pity freely let flow, no touch of noble anger responded to, no scudding before the breeze of indignation, — all this, that reason may keep on the even tenour of her way undisturbed. 6. The fault in this picture is that it is not the picture of a man, but of a spirit. He who being man should try to realize it in himself, would fall short of human perfection. For though the sensi- tive appetite is distinguished from the will, and the two may clash and come in conflict, yet they are not two wholly independent powers, but the one man is both will and sensitive appetite, and he rarely operates according to one power without the other being brought into corresponding play. There is a similar concomitance of the operations of intellect and imagination. What attracts the sensitive appetite, commonly allures also the affective will, though on advertence the elective will may reject it. On the other hand, a strong affection and election of the will cannot be without the sensitive appetite being stirred, and that so strongly that the motion is notable in the body, — in other words, is a passion^ 46 OF PASSIONS. Passion is the natural and in a certain degree the inseparable adjunct of strong volition. To check one is to check the other. Not only is the passion repressed by repressing the volition, but the repres- sion of the passion is also the repression of the volition. A man then who did his best to repress all movements of passion indiscriminately, would lay fetters on his will, lamentable and cruel and impolitic fetters, where his will was bent on any object good and honourable and well judged. 7. Again, man's will is reached by two channels, from above downwards and from below upwards : it is reached through the reason and through the imagination and senses. By the latter channel it often receives evil impressions, undoubtedly, but not unfrequently by the former also. Reason may be inconsiderate, vain, haughty, mutinous, unduly sceptical. The abuse is no justification for closing either channel. Now the channel of the senses and of the imagination is the wider, and in many cases affords the better passage of the two. The will that is hardly reached by reason, is approached and won by a pathetic sight, a cry of enthusiasm, a threat that sends a tremor through the limbs. Rather I should say the affective will is approached in this way : for it remains with the elective will, on adver- tence and consultation with reason, to decide whether or not it shall be won to consent. But were it not for the channel of passion, this will could never have been approached at all even by reasons the most cogent. Rhetoric often succeeds, where mere dry logic would have been thrown away. God PASSIONS IN GENERAL. 47 help vast numbers of the human race, if their wills were approachable only through their reasons ! They would indeed be fixtures. 8. Another fact to notice is the liability of the reason's gaze to become morbid and as it were inflamed by unremitting exercise. I do not here allude to hard study, but to overcurious scanning of the realities of this life, and the still greater realities and more momentous possibilities of the world to come. There is a sense of the surroundings being too much for us, an alarm and a giddiness that comes of sober matter-of-fact thought over pro- longed. Then it happens that one or more unde- niable truths are laid hold of, and considered in strong relief and in isolation from the rest : the result is a distorted and partial view of truth as a whole, and therewith the mind is troubled. Here the kindlier passions, judiciously allowed to play, come in to soothe the wound and soreness of pure intel- lect, too keen in its workings for one who is not yet a pure spirit. 9. Moral good and evil are predicable only of human acts, in the technical sense of the term (c. i. nn. 2 — 4). As the passions by definition (c. iv. s. i. n. I.) are not human acts, they can never be morally evil of themselves. But they are an occasion of moral evil in this way. They often serve to wake up the slumbering Reason. To that end it is necessary that they should start up of themselves without the call of Reason. This would be no inconvenience, if the instant Reason awoke, and adverted to the tumult and stir of Passion, she could 48 OF PASSIONS. ■ take command of it, and where she saw fit, quell iU But Reason has no such command, except in cases where she has acquired it by years of hard fightings Passion once afoot holds on her course against the dictate of Reason. True, so long as it remains mere Passion, and Reason is not dragged away by it, no consent of the will given, no voluntary act elicited^ still less carried into outward effect, — so long as things remain thus, however Passion may rage,, there is no moral evil done. But there is a great temptation, and in great temptation many men falL The evil is the act of free will, but the pressure on the will is the pressure of Passion. But Passion happily is a young colt amenable to discipline* Where the assaults of Passion are resolutely and piously withstood, and the incentives thereto avoided — unnatural and unnecessary incentives I mean — Passion itself acquires a certain habit of obedience to Reason, which habit is moral virtue. Of that presently. lo. In a man of confirmed habits of moral virtue, Passion starts up indeed independently of Reason, but then Reason ordinarily finds little diffi- culty in regulating the Passion so aroused. In a certain high and extraordinary condition of human nature, not only has Reason entire mastery over Passion wherever she finds it astir, but Passion cannot stir in the first instance, without Reason calling upon it to do so. In this case the torpor of the will deprecated above (n. 7) is not to be feared, because Reason is so vigorous and so masterful as to be adequate to range everywhere and meet all emer* OF DESIRE. 49> gencies without the goad of Passion. This state is called by divines the state of integrity. In it Adam was before he sinned. It was lost at the Fall, and has not been restored by the Redemption. It is not a thing in any way due to human nature: nothing truly natural to man was forfeited by Adam's sin^ It is no point of holiness, no guerdon of victory^ this state of integrity, but rather a being borne on* angel's wings above the battle. But one who has. no battle in his own breast against Passion, may yet suffer and bleed and die under exterior persecution :; nay, he may, if he wills, let in Passion upon himself,, to fear and grieve, when he need not. So did the- Second Adam in the Garden of Gethsemane. Readings. — St. Thos., la, q. 8i, art. 2, in corp. ; id. la 2ae, q. 23, art. i, in corp. ; ib. q. 23, art. 2, in Corp. ; Cicero, Tusc. Disp. iv. cc. 17 — 26 ; St. Aug.,. De Civitate Dei, ix. cc. 4, 5; Ar., Eth.y III. v. 3, 4;. ih. I. xiii. 15 — 17; St. Thos., 3a, q. 15, art. 4; id. la. 2ae, q. 59, art. 5. Section II. — Of Desire. I. Desires are eithox physical cravings, by moderns called appetites; or psychical desires or tastesy called desires proper. The appetites have their beginning in bodily uneasiness. They are felt needs of some- thing required for the animal maintenance of the individual or of the race. The objects of the several appetites are Meat and Drink, Warmth or Coolness, Exercise and Repose, Sleep, Sex. The object of mere appetite is marked by quantity only^ not by quality. This is to say, the thing is sought E 50 OF PASSIONS. for in the vague, in a certain amount sufficient to supply the want, but not this or that variety of the thing. The cry of a hungry man is, " Give me to eat," if very hungry, " Give me much : " but so far as he is under the mere dominion of appetite he does not crave any particular article of food, vege- table or animal : he wants quantity merely. So of thirst, so of all the appetites, where there is nothing else but appetite present. 2. But if a thirsty man cries for champagne, or a hungry man fancies a venison pasty, there is another element beyond appetite in that demand. On the matter of the physical craving there is stamped the form of a psychical desire. The psychical element prescribes a quality to the objects sought. The thirsty man thus prompted no longer wants drink but wine : the man mewed up within doors no longer calls for exercise, but for a horse or a bicycle. It is obvious that in man the appetites generally pass into the further shape of psychical desire. It is when the appetite is vehement, or the man is one who makes slight study of his animal wants, that pure appetite, sheer physical craving, is best shown. Darius flying before his conqueror is ready to drink at any source, muddy or clear, a drink is all that he wants : it is all that is wanted by St. Paul the first Hermit. But your modern lounger at the clubs, what variety of liquors are excogitated to please his palate ! 3. Not all psychical desires are on the matter of appetite ; they may be fixed on any good whatsoever of body or of mind. Many psychical desires are OF DESIRE. 51 not passions at all, but reside exclusively in the superior part of the soul, in the will prompted by the understanding, and do not affect the body in any sensible way. Such for instance is the great desire of happiness. Those desires that are passions are prompted, not by the understanding, but by the imagination or fancy, imaging to itself some parti- cular good, not good in general, for that the under- standing contemplates. Fancy paints the picture ; or if sense presents it, fancy appropriates and embel- lishes it : the sensitive appetite fastens upon the representation : the bodily organs sensibly respond ; and there is the passion of psychical desire. 4. Physical cravings y or appetites y have limited objects : the objects of psychical desires may be tmlimited. A thirsty man thirsts not for an ocean, but for drink quantum sufficit: give him that and the appetite is gone. But the miser covets all the money that he can get : the voluptuary ranges land and sea in search of a new pleasure : the philosopher ever longs for a higher knowledge : the saint is indefatigable in doing good. Whatever a man takes to be an end in itself, not simply a means, that he desires without end or measure. What he desires as a means, he desires under a limitation, so far forth as it nxakes for the end, so much and no more : as Aristotle says of the processes of art, "The end in view is the limit to them all," iripa^ to t€\o9 (Cf. c. ii. s. iii. n. 3). Whatever is desired as an end in itself, is taken to be a part of happiness, or to represent happiness. Happiness and the object that gives happiness is the one thing that man desires for itself, and desires 52 OF PASSIONS. without end or measure. Unfortunately he is often mistaken in the choice of this object. He often takes for an end what is properly only a means. They "whose god is their belly," have made this mistake in regard of the gratification of appetite. It is not appetite proper that has led to this per- version, but psychical desire, or appetite inflamed by the artificial stimulus of imagination. For one who would be temperate, it is more important to control his imagination than to trouble about his appetite. Appetite exhausts itself, sometimes within the bounds of what is good for the subject, some- times beyond them, but still within some bounds ; but there is no limit to the cravings bred of imagination. 5. By this canon a man may try himself to dis- cover whether or not a favourite amusement is gain- ing too much upon him. An amusement is properly a means to the end, that a man may come away from it better fitted to do the serious work of his life. Pushed beyond a certain point, the amuse- ment ceases to minister to this end. The wise man drops it at that point. But if one knows not where to stop : or if when stopped in spite of himself, he is restless till he begin again, and never willingly can forego any measure of the diversion that comes within his reach, the means in that case has passed into an end : he is enslaved to that amusement, inasmuch as he will do anything and everything for the sake of it. Thus some men serve pleasure, and other men money. 6. Hence is apparent the folly of supposing that crimes against property are preventible simply by OF DESIRE. 53 placing it within the power of all members of the community easily to earn an honest livelihood, and therewith the satisfaction of all their natural needs. It is not merely to escape cold or hunger that men turn to burglary or fraudulent dealing : it is more for the gratification of a farfcy, the satisfaction of an inordinate desire. Great crimes are not com- mitted "to keep the wolf from the door," but because of the wolf in the heart, the overgrown psychical desire, which is bred in many a well- nourished, warmly clad, comfortably housed, highly educated citizen. There is a sin born of "fulness of bread." Readings. — St. Thos., la 2ae, q. 30, art. 3, in Corp.; ib. q. 30, art. 4, in Corp.; Ar.,Eth.,III. xi. I — 4; An, Pol., I. ix. 13; ib. II. vii. 11 — 13. N.B. — The division of desires into physical and psychical is first suggested by Plato, who (Rep. 558 ^ to 559 c) divides them as necessary and un- necessary. Unnecessary desires he treats as evil. What Plato calls a necessary, Aristotle calls a physical, and St. Thomas a natural desire. Unfortunately, Aristotle and St. Thomas had but one word for our English two, physical and natural. Desires that are not physical, not natural nor necessary to man in his animal capacity, may be highly natural and becoming to man as he is a reasonable being, or they may be highly unbecoming. These psychical desires, called by St. Thomas not natural, take in at once the noblest and the basest aspirations of humanity. 54 OF PASSIONS. Section III. — Of Delight, 1. Delight like desire may be either physical or psychical. All that has been said above of desire under this division applies also to delight, which is the realization of desire. This division does not altogether fall in with that into sensiml delights and intellectual delights. A professional wine-taster could hardly be said to find intellectual delight in a bottle of good Champagne, real Veuve-Clicquot : yet certainly his is a psychical delight, no mere un- sophisticated gratification of appetite. Sensual delights then are those dehghts which are founded on the gratification of appetite, whether simple — in which case the delight is physical — or studied and fancy-wrought appetite, the gratification of which is psychical delight. Intellectual delights on the other hand are those that come of the exercise of intellect, not unsupported by imagination, but where appetite enters not at all, or only as a remote adjunct, albeit the delight may turn upon some sight or sound, as of music, or of a fine range of hills. Or the object may be a thing of intellect, pure and removed from sense as far as an object of human contemplation can be, for instance, the first elements of matter, freewill, the immensity of order, and moral » w * OF JUSTICE. . 103 comeliness of the soul, but not Justice in any sense, inasmuch as it is not referred to any being human or divine, collective or individual, outside of the man himself. 2. Going upon the principle that all Justice is of the nature of equality, and is therefore relative to another, we arrive at the definition of general justice, which is all virtue whatsoever, inasmuch as it bears upon another person than him who practises iU This Justice is perfect social virtue, the crown and perfection of all virtue from a statesman's point of view ; and in that aspect, as Aristotle says," neither morning star nor evening star is so beautiful.'' Whoever has this virtue behaves well, not by himself merely, but towards others — a great addition. Many a one who has done well enough as an individual^ has done badly in a public capacity : whence the proverb, that office shows the man. This Justice may well be called another man's good : though not in the sense of the sophists of old, and the altruists of our time, that virtue is a very good thing fdr everyone else than its possessor. Virtue, like health,, may be beneficial to peighbours, but the first benefit of it flows in upon the soul to whom it belongs : for virtue is the health of the soul. 3. Another elementary notion of Justice connects it with Law, taking Justice to be conformity to Law^ This notion exhibits leg'al justice, which is the same thing, under another aspect, as the general justice mentioned above, inasmuch as general justice in- cludes the exercise of all virtues in so far as they bear upon the good of others : and the law, to which. 104 OF HABITS AND VIRTUES. legal justice conforms a man, enjoins acts of all virtues for the common good. It must be observed, however, that though there is no natural virtue of which the law of man may not prescribe some exer- cise, still no human law enjoins all acts of all virtues, not even all obligatory acts. A man may fail in his duty though he has kept all the laws of man. In order then that legal justice may include the whole duty of man, it must be referred to that natural and eternal law of God, revealed or unrevealed, of which we shall speak hereafter. By being conformed to this divine law a man is a just man, a righteous man. It is this sense of Justice that appears in the theo- logical term, justification. In this sense, Zachary and Elizabeth " were both just before God, walking in all the commandments of the Lord without blame " (St. Luke i. 6). 4. General, or legal, justice is not the cardinal virtue so called, but is in one point of view identical with all virtue. Distinguished from the other three cardinal virtues is particular justice, which is divided into distributive and commutative justice. Distributive justice is exercised by the community through its heads towards its individual members, so that there be a fair distribution of the common goods, in vary- ing amount and manner, according to the various merits and deserts of the several recipients. The matters distributed are public emoluments and honours, public burdens, rewards and also punish- ments. Distributive justice is the virtue of the king and of the statesman, of the commander-in-chief, of the judge, and of the public functionary gener- OF JUSTICE. 105 ally. It is violated by favouritism, partiality, and jobbery. Distributive justice is the Justice that we adore in the great Governor of the Universe, saying that He is "just in all His works," even though we understand them not. When it takes the form of punishing, it is called vindictive justice. This is what the multitudes clamoured for, that filled the pre- cincts of the Palace of Whitehall in the days of Charles I. with cries of Justice, Justice, for the head of Strafford. 5. Neither legal nor distributive justice fully answers to the definition of that virtue. Justice disposes us to give to another his own. The party towards whom Justice is practised must be wholly other and different from him who practises it. But it is clear that the member of a civil community is not wholly other and different from the State : he is partially identified with the civil community to which he belongs. Therefore neither the tribute of legal justice paid by the individual to the State, nor the grant of distributive justice from the State to the individual, is an exercise of Justice in the strictest sense. Again, what the individual pays to the State because he is legally bound to pay it, does not become the State's own until after payment. If he withhold it, though he do wrong, yet he is not said to be keeping any portion of the public property in his private hands : he only fails to make some of his private property public, which the law bids him. abdicate and make bver. If this be true of money and goods, it is still more evidently true of honour and services. In like manner, in the matter of dis- io6 OF HABITS AND VIRTUES. tributive justice, the emoluments which a subject has a claim to, the rewards which he has merited of the State, does not become his till he actually gets them into his hands. It may be unfair and immoral that they are withheld from him, and in that case, so long as the circumstances remain the same, the obligation rests with and presses upon the State, and those who represent it, to satisfy his claim : still the State is not keeping the individual from that which is as yet his own. In the language of the Roman lawyers, he has at best a jus ad rem, a right that the thing be made his, but not a jus in re ; that is, the thing is not properly his before he actually gets it. 6. Commutative justice alone is Justice strictly so called : for therein alone the parties to the act are perfectly other and other, and the matter that passes between them, if withheld by one of the parties, would make a case of keeping the other out of that which he could still properly call by right his own. Commutative justice runs between two indi- viduals, or two independent States, or between the State and an individual inasmuch as the latter is an independent person, having rights of his own against the former. This justice is called commutative, from being concerned with exchanges, or contracts, volun- tary and involuntary. The idea of a voluntary con- tract, like that between buyer and seller, is familiar enough. But the notion of an involuntary contract is technical, and requires explanation. Whoever, then, wrongfully takes that which belongs to another, enters into an involuntary contract, or makes an OF JUSTICE. 107 involuntary exchange, with the party. This he may do by taking away his property, honour, reputation, liberty, or bodily ease and comfort. This is an involuntary transaction, against the will of the party that suffers. It is a contract, because the party that does the damage takes upon himself, whether he will or no, by the very act of doing it, the obligation of making the damage good, and of restoring what he has taken away. This is the obligation of restitution^ which attaches to breaches of commutative justice, and, strictly speaking, to them alone. Thus, if a minister has not promoted a deserving officer in face of a clear obligation of distributive justice, the obligation indeed remains as that of a duty unful- filled, so long as he remains minister with the patronage in his hands : but the promotion, if he finally makes it, is not an act of restitution : it is giving to the officer that which was not his before. And if the opportunity has passed, he owes the officer nothing in compensation. But if he has insulted the officer, he owes him an apology for all time to come : he must give back that honour which belonged to the officer, and of which he has robbed him. This is restitution. In a thousand practical cases it is important, and often a very nice question to decide, whether a particular offence, such as failure to pay taxes, be a sin against commutative justice or only against some more general form of the virtue. If the former, restitution is due : if the latter, repentance only and purpose of better things in future, but not reparation of the past. 7. The old notion, that justice is minding your io8 OF HABITS AND VIRTUES. own business, and leaving your neighbour to mind his, furnishes a good rough statement of the obli- gations of commutative justice. They are mainly negative, to leave your neighbour alone in his right of life and limb, of liberty and property, of honour 'and reputation. But in two ways your neighbour's business may become yours in justice. The first way is, if you have any contract with him, whether a formal contract, as that between a railway com- pany and its passengers, or a virtual contract, by reason of some office that you bear, as the office of a bishop and pastor in relation to the souls of his flock. The second way in which commutative justice binds you to positive action, is when undue damage is likely to occur to another from some activity of yours. If, passing by, I see my neigh- bour's house on fire, not having contracted to watch it for him, and not having caused the fire myself, I am not bound in strict justice to warn him of his danger. I am bound indeed by charity, but that is not the point here. But if the fire has broken out from my careless use of fire, commutative justice binds me to raise the alarm. 8. The most notable potential parts of Justice — Religion, Obedience, Truthfulness — enter into the treatise of Natural Law. Readings. — Ar., Eth., V., i. ; Plato, Rep., 433 a ; ib. 443 c, D, E ; St.Thos., 2a 2ae, q. 58, art. 2, in corp. ; ib. q. 58, art. 5 ; ib. q. 58, art. 6, in corp. ; ib. q. 58, art. 7 ; ib. q. 58, art. 9, in corp. ; ib. q. 61, art. i, in corp. ; ib. q. 61, art. 3, in corp. ; Ar., Eth., V., ii., 12, 13 ; St. Thos., 2a 2ae, q. 62, art. i, in corp., ad 2. CHAPTER VI. OF THE ORIGIN OF MORAL OBLIGATION. Section I. — Of the natural difference between Good and Evil, I. A GRANITE boulder lying on an upland moor stands indifferently the August sun and the January frost, flood and drought. It neither blooms in spring, nor fades in autumn. It is all one to the boulder whether it remain in the picturesque soli- tude where the glacier dropped it, or be laid in the gutter of a busy street. It has no growth nor development : it is not a subject of evolution : there is no goal of perfection to which it is tending by dint of inward germinal capacity seconded by favour- able environment. Therefore it does not matter what you do with it : all things come alike to that lump of rock. 2. But in a cranny or cleft of the same there is a little flower growing. You cannot do what you will with that flower. It has its exigencies and requirements. Had it a voice, it could say, what the stone never could : * I must have this or that : I must have light, I must have moisture, a certain heat, some soil to grow in.' There is a course to be run by this flower and the plant that bears it, a development to be wrought out, a perfection to no OF THE ORIGIN OF MORAL OBLIGATION. be achieved. For this end certain conditions are necessary, or helpful : certain others prejudicial, or altogether intolerable. In fact, that plant has a progressive nature, and therewith is a subject of good and evil. Good to that plant is what favours its natural progress, and evil is all that impedes it. 3. All organic natures are progressive : that is, each individual of them is apt to make a certain progress, under certain conditions, from birth to maturity. But man alone has his progress in any degree in his own hands, to make or to mar. Man alone, in the graphic phrase of Appius Claudius, is faber fortunce suce, "the shaper of his own destiny." Any other plant or animal, other than man, however miserable a specimen of its kind it finally prove to be, has always done the best for itself under the cir- cumstances : it has attained the limit fixed for it by its primitive germinal capacity, as modified by the events of its subsequent environment. The miser- able animal that howls under your window at night, is the finest dog that could possibly have come of his blood and breeding, nurture and education. But there is no man now on earth that has done all for himself that he might have done. We all fall short in many things of the perfection that is within our reach. Man therefore needs to stir himself, and to be energetic with a free, self-determined energy to come up to the standard of humanity. It is only his free acts that are considered by the moralist. Such is the definition of Moral Science, that it deals with human acts; acts, that is, whereof man is master to do or not to do (c. i., nn. i, 2). DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL. iii 4. We have it, then, that a morally good act is an act that makes towards the progress of human 1^ nature in him who does it, and which is freely done. Similarly, a morally evil act is a bar to progress, or a diversion of it from the right line, being also a free act. Now, that act only can make for the progress of human nature, which befits and suits human nature, and suits it in its best and most distinctive characteristic. What is best in man, what characterises and makes man, what the old schoolmen called the form of man, is his reason. To be up to reason is to be up to the standard of humanity. Human progress is progress on the lines of reason. To make for that progress, and thereby to be morally good, an act must be done, not blindly, brutishly, sottishly, or on any impulse of passion, however beneficial in its effects, but deliberately, and in conscious accordance with the reasonable nature of the doer. 5. Whatever be man's end and highest good, he must go about to compass it reasonably. He must plan, and be systematic, and act on principle. For instance, if the public health be the highest good, the laws which govern it must be investigated, and their requirements carried out, without regard to senti- ment. If pleasure be the good, we must be artists of pleasure. If, however, as has been seen (c. ii.) the highest good of man is the highest play of reason herself in a life of contemplation to be prepared for, though it cannot be adequately and worthily lived in this world, then it is through following reason, through subjecting appetite to reason by 112 OF THE ORIGIN OF MORAL OBLIGATION. temperance, and the will to reason by justice, and reason herself by a " reasonable service " to God, that this end and consummation must be wrought out. Thus, in Plato's phrase (Rep., 589 b), the moral man acts so that " the inner man within him, the rational part of his nature, shall be strongest ; while he watches with a husbandman's care over the many-headed beast of appetite, rearing and training the creature's tame heads, and not letting the wild one's grow ; for this purpose making an ally of the lion, the irascible part of his nature, and caring for all the parts in common, making them friends to one another and to himself." In this way he will meet the true exigency of his nature as a whole, with due regard to the proper order and subordination of the parts. He who lives otherwise, acts in contradiction to his rational self (c. v., s. iii., n. 3). 6. The result of the above reasoning, if result it has, should be to explain and justify the Stoic rule, naturcB convenienter vivere, to live according to nature. But some one will say : ' That is the very ideal of wickedness : all good in man comes of overcoming nature, and doing violence to natural cravings: live according to nature, and you will go straight to the devil.' I answer : ' Live according to a part of your nature, and that the baser and lower, though also the more impetuous and clamorous part, and you will certainly go where you say: but live up to the whole of your nature, as explained in the last paragraph, and you will be a man indeed, and will reach the goal of human happiness.' But again it may be objected, that our very reason, to which the DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL. 113 rest of our nature is naturally subordinate, frequently prompts us to do amiss. The objection is a just one, in so far as it goes upoil a repudiation of the old Platonic position, that all moral evil comes of the body, wherein the soul is imprisoned, and of the desires which the body fastens upon the soul. Were that so, all sins would be sins of sensuality. But there are spiritual sins, not prompted by any lust or weakness of the body, as pride and mutiny, self- opiniatedness, rejection of Divine revelation. The objection turns on sins such as these. The answer is, that spiritual sins do not .arise from any exigency ^^ of reason, but from a deficiency of reason ; not from that faculty calling upon us, as we are reasonable men, to take a certain course, in accordance with a just and full view of the facts of the case, but from reason failing to look facts fully in the face, and considering only some of them to the neglect of others, the consideration of which would alter the decision. Thus a certain proud creature mentioned in Scripture thought of the magnificence of the throne above the stars of God, on the mountain of the covenant, on the sides of the north : he did not think how such a pre-eminence would become him as a creature. He had in view a rational good certainly, but not a rational good for him. Partial reason, like a little knowledge, is a dangerous thing. 7. As it is not in the power of God to bring it about, that the angles of a triangle taken together shall amount to anything else than two right angles, so it is not within the compass of Divine omnipo- I 114 OF THE ORIGIN OF MORAL OBLIGATION. tence to create a man for whom it shall be a good and proper thing, and befitting his nature, to blaspheme, to perjure himself, to abandon himself recklessly to lust, or anger, or any other passion. God need not have created man at all, but He could not have created him with other than human exigen- cies. The reason is, because God can only create upon the pattern of His own essence, which is imitable, outside of God, in certain definite lines of possibility. These possibilities, founded upon the Divine essence and discerned by the Divine intelli- gence, are the Archetype Ideas, among which the Divine will has to choose, when it proceeds to create. The denial of this doctrine in the Nominalist and Cartesian Schools, and their reference to the arbi- trary will of God of the eternal, immutable, and absolutely necessary relations of possible things, is the subversion of all science and philosophy. 8. Still less are moral distinctions between good and evil to be set down to the law of the State, or the fashion of society. Human convention can no more constitute moral good than it can physical good, or mathematical or logical truth. It is only in cases where two or more courses are tolerable, and one of them needs to be chosen and adhered to for the sake of social order, that human authority steps in to elect and prescribe one of those ways of action, and brand the others as illegitimate, which would otherwise be lawful. This is called the making of a positive law. Readings, — la 2ae, q. i8, art. 5, in corp. ; la 2ae, q. 71, art. 2 ; Plato, Rep. 588 b to end of bk. ix. ; DUTY AND SIN. 115 At., Eth., IX., iv., nn. 4 — 10 ; Suarez, De Legibus, II., vi., nn. 4, II ; Cicero, De Legibus, i., cc. 15 — 17. Section XL — How Good becomes bounden Duty, and Evil is advanced to Sin, I. The great problem of Ethics is the explana- tion of the idea, / ought (c. i., n. 6). We are now come close up to the solution of that problem. The word ought denotes the necessary bearing of means upon end. To every ought there is a pendent if. The means ought to be taken, if the end is to be secured. Thus we say: ' You ought to start betimes, if you are to catch your train.' 'You ought to study harder, if you are to pass your examination.' The person spoken to might reply : ' But what if I do miss my train, or fail in my examination ? ' He might be met with another ought: *You ought not to miss the one, if you are to keep your appoint- ment : or to fail in the other, if you are to get into a profession.' Thus the train of oughts and ifs extends, until we come finally to a concatenation like the following : ' You ought not to break your word, or to give needless pain to your parents, if you don't want to do violence to that nature which is yours as a reasonable being,' or * to thwart your own moral development,' — and so on in a variety of phrases descriptive of the argument of the last section. Here it seems the chain is made fast to a staple in the wall. If a person goes on to ask, * Well, what if I do contradict my rational self?' — ^we can only tell him that he is a fool for his question. The oughts, such as those wherewith our illustration ii6 OF THE ORIGIN OF MORAL OBLIGATION. commenced, Kant calls the hypothetical imperative^ the form being, ' You must, unless : ' but the ought wherein it terminated, he calls the categorical impera- tive, the alternative being such as no rational man can accept, and therefore no alternative at all. 2. This doctrine of the Categorical Imperative is correct and valuable so far as it goes. But then it does not go far enough. The full notion of what a man ought, is what he must do under pain of sin. Sin is more than folly, more than a breach of reason. It is mild reproach to a great criminal to tell him that he is a very foolish person, a walking unreason- ableness. If he chooses to contradict his rational self, is not that his own affair ? Is he not his own master, and may he not play the fool if he likes ? The answer is, 'No, he is not his own master; he is under law, and his folly and self-abuse becomes criminal and sinful, by being in contravention of the law that forbids him to throw himself away thus wantonly.' 3. Kant readily takes up this idea, shaping it after his own fashion. He contends, — and herein his doctrine is not merely deficient, but positively in error, — that the Categorical Imperative, uttered by a man's own reason, has the force of a law, made by that same reason ; so that the legislative authority is within the breast of the doer, who owes it obedi- ence. This he calls the autonomy of reason. It is also called Independent Morality, inasmuch as it establishes right and wrong without regard to external authority, or to the consequences of actions, or to rewards and punishments. The doctrine is DUTY AND SIN. 117 erroneous, inasmuch as it undertakes to settle the matter of right and wrong without reference to external authority; and inasmuch as it makes the reason within a man, not the promulgator of the law to him, but his own legislator. For a law is a precept, a command : now no one issues precepts, or gives commands, to himself. To command is an act of jurisdiction; and jurisdiction, like justice (see c. v., s. ix., n. i) requires a distinction of persons, one ruler, and another subject. But the reason in a man is not a distinct subject from the will, appetites, or other faculties within him, to which reason dictates : they are all one nature, one person, one man; consequently, no one of them can strictly be said to command the rest ; and the dictate of reason, as emanating from within oneself, is not a law. But without a law, there is no strict obliga- tion. Therefore the whole theory of obligation is not locked up in the Categorical Imperative, as Kant formulated it. 4. The above argumentation evinces that God is not under any law : for there is no other God above Him to command Him. As for the ideas of what is meet and just in the Divine intelligence, though the Divine will, being a perfect will, is not liable to act against them, yet are those ideas improperly called a law to the Divine will, because intellect and will are identified in one God. Kant's doctrine makes us all gods. It is a deification of the human intellect, an identification of that intellect with the supreme and universal Reason ; and at the same time a release of the human will from all authority ii8 OF THE ORIGIN OF MORAL OBLIGATION. extraneous to the individual. This amounts to a putting off of all authority properly so called, and makes each man as sovereign and unaccountable as his Maker. " Thy heart is lifted up, and thou hast said : I am God, and sit in the chair of God : and hast set thy heart as if it were the heart of God : whereas thou art a man and not God" (Ezech, xxviii. 2). Kant is thus the father of the pantheistic school of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. 5. But it has been contended that this phrase about a man who does wrong breaking a law, is only a metaphor and figure of speech, unless it be used with reference to the enactment of some civil com- munity. Thus John Austin says that a natural law is a law which is not, but which he who uses the expression thinks ought to be made. At this rate sin is not a transgression of any law, except so far as it happens to be, in the lawyer's sense of the word, a crime, or something punishable in a human court of justice. There will then be no law but man's law. How then am I obliged to obey man's law ? Dr. Bain answers : " Because, if you disobey, you will be punished,''^ But that punishment will be either just or unjust : if unjust, it originates no obligation : if just, it presupposes an obligation, as it presupposes a crime and sin, that is, an obligation violated. There seems to be nothing left for John Austin but to fall back upon Kant and his Cate- gorical Imperative, and say that whoever rebels against the duly constituted authority of the State in which he lives, is a rebel against the reason that dwells within his own breast, and which requires DUTY AND SIN. iig him to behave like a citizen. So that ultimately it is not the State, but his own reason that he has offended ; and the State has no authority over him except what his own reason gives. 6. If this were true, there would be no sin any- where except what is called philosophical sin, that is, a breach of the dignity of man's rational nature ; and the hardest thing that could be said in repro- bation of a wrongdoer, would be that he had gone against himself, and against his fellow-men, by out- raging reason, the common attribute of the race. 7. Far worse than that has the sinner done. He has offended against his own reason, and thereby against a higher Reason, substantially distinct from his, standing to it in the relation of Archetype to type, a Living Reason, efi^^v^o^ \6yo<; (cf. Ar., Eth., v., iv., 7), purely and supremely rational. The Archetype is outraged by the violation of the type. Moreover, as the two are substantially distinct, the one being God, the other a faculty of man, there is room for a command, for law. A man may trans- gress and sin, in more than the philosophical sense of the word : he may be properly a law-breaker, by offending against this supreme Reason, higher and other than his own. 8. Here we must pause and meditate a parable* — ^There was a certain monastery where the monks lived in continual violation of monastic observance. Their Abbot was a holy man, a model of what a monk ought to be. But though perfectly cognisant of the delinquencies of his community, he was con- tent to display to his subjects the edifying example I20 OF THE ORIGIN OF MORAL OBLIGATION. of his own life, and to let it appear that he was aware of their doings and pained at them. He would croon softly as he went about the house old Heli's words : " Not so, my sons, not so : why do ye these kind of things, very wicked things ? " But the monks took no notice of him. It happened in course of time that the Abbot went away for about ten days. What he did in that time, never transpired : though there was some whisper of certain " spiritual exercises," which he was said to have been engaged in. Certain it is, that he returned to his monastery, as he left it, a monk devout and regular : the monk was the same, but the Abbot was mightily altered. The morning after his arrival, a Chapter was held : the Abbot had the Rule read from cover to cover, and announced his intention of enforcing the same. And he was as good as his word. Transgressions of course abounded : but the monks discovered that to transgress was quite a different thing now from what it had been. Seeing the law proclaimed, and the Abbot in earnest to enforce it, they too reformed themselves : the few who would not reform had to leave. The subsequent holy lives of those monks do not enter into this history. 9. Now, we might fancy God our Lord like the Abbot of that monastery in the early years of his rule. We might fancy the Supreme Reason, dis- pleased indeed, as Reason must be, at the excesses and follies of mankind, but not otherwise com- manding men to avoid those evil courses. Were God to be thus quiescent, what we have called (n. 6) philosophical sin, would indeed carry this additional DUTY AND SIN. 121 malice, beyond what was there set down, of being an offence against God, but it would not be a grievous offence : for it would not be a sin in the proper sense of the term, not being a transgression of the law of God, inasmuch as God, by the suppo- sition, would have given no law. But the supposition itself is absurd. God could not so withhold His command. He is free indeed not to command, but that only by not creating. If He wills to have creatures. He must likewise will to bind them to certain lines of action : which will to bind in God is a law to the creature. 10. This assertion, that God cannot but will to bind His creatures to certain lines of action, must be proved, though in the ascent we have to mount to high regions, and breathe those subtle airs that are wafted round the throne of the Eternal. As God is the one source of all reality and of all power, not only can there be no being which He has not created and does not still preserve, but no action either can take place without His concurrence. God must go with His every creature in its every act : otherwise, on the creature's ^part, nothing could be done. Now, God cannot be indifferent what manner of act He shall concur unto. A servant or a subject may be indifferent what command he receives : he may will simply to obey, — to go here or there, as he is bid, or to be left without orders where he is. That is because he leaves the entire direction and management of the household to his master. But for God to be thus indifferent what action He should lend His concurrence to, would be to forego all 122 OF THE ORIGIN OF MORAL OBLIGATION. design and purpose of His own as to the use and destiny of the creatures which He has made and continually preserves. This God cannot do, for He cannot act aimlessly. It would be renouncing the direction of His own work, and making the creature His superior. God is incapable of such renunciation and subservience. He must, then, will the coopera- tion which He lends, and the concurrent action of the creature, to take a certain course, regulated and prescribed by Himself: which is our proposition, that God cannot but will to bind His creatures to certain lines of action. If His free creatures choose to stray from these lines, God indeed still cooperates, and to His cooperation is to be ascribed the physical goodness of the action, not its tnoral inordinateness and inopportuneness. Still, as the action is morally inordinate, God may be said to cooperate, in a manner, where He would not: whence we gather some conception of the enormity of sin (See c. vii., nn. 5, 6). 11. The lines of action laid down and prescribed by God are not arbitrary and irrespective of the subject of the command. They are determined in each case by the nature of the subject. The Author of Nature is not apt to subvert that order which proceeds from Himself. He bids every creature act up to that nature wherein He has created it. His commands follow the line of natural exigency. What this natural exigency amounts to in man in regard to his human acts, we have already seen (c. vi., s. i.). 12. The difference between a necessary and a free DUTY AND SIN. 123 agent is, that the former is determined by its nature to act in a certain way, and cannot act otherwise : the latter may act in more ways than one. Still, as we have seen, the nature even of a free agent is not indifferent to all manner of action. It requires, though it does not constrain, the agent to act in certain definite ways, the ways of moral goodness. Acting otherwise, as he may do, the free agent gain- says his own nature, taken as a whole, a thing that a necessary agent can nowise do. God, therefore, who, as we have shown, wills and commands all creatures whatsoever to act on the lines of their nature, has especial reason to give this command to .His rational creatures, with whom alone rests thqf momentous freedom to disobey. 13. We are now abreast of the question, of such burning interest in these days, as to the connection of Ethics with Theology, or of Morality with Religion. I will not enquire whether the dogmatic atheist is logically consistent in maintaining any distinction between right and wrong : happily, dogmatic atheists do not abound. But there are many who hold that, whether there be a God or no, the fact ought not to be imported into Moral Science : that a Professor of Ethics, as such, has no business with the name of the Almighty on his lips, any more than a lecturer on Chemistry or Fortification. This statement must be at once qualified by an important proviso. If we have any duties of worship and praise towards our Maker : if there is such a virtue as religion, and such a sin as blasphemy : surely a Professor of Morals must point that out. He cannot in that case 124 OF THE ORIGIN OF MORAL OBLIGATION. suppress all reference to God, for the same reason that he cannot help going into the duties of a man to his wife, or of an individual to the State, if marriage and civil government are natural institu- tions. If there is a God to be worshipped, any book on Moral Science is incomplete without a chapter on Religion. But the question remains, whether the name of God should enter into the other chapters, and His being and authority into the very foundations of the science. I do not mean the meta- physical foundations; for Metaphysics are like a two-edged sword, that cleaves down to the very marrow of things, and must therefore reveal and discover God. But Morality, like Mathematics,* takes certain metaphysical foundations for granted, without enquiring into them. On these foundations we rear the walls, so to speak, of the science of Ethics without reference to God, but we cannot put the roof and crown upon the erection, unless we speak of Him and of His law. Moral distinctions, as we saw (c. vi., s. i., n. 7), are antecedent to the Divine command to observe them : and though they rest ultimately on the Divine nature, that ultimate ground belongs to Metaphysics, not to Ethics. Ethics begin with human nature, pointing out that there are certain human acts that do become a man, and others that do not (c. vi., s. i.). To see this, it is not necessary to look up above man. Thus we shall prove lying, suicide, and murder to be wrong, and good fellowship a duty, without needing to mention the Divine Being, though by considering Him the proof gains in cogency. Or, rather, apart from God DUTY AND SIN. 125 we shall prove certain acts wrong, and other acts obligatory as duties, philosophically speaking, with an initial and fundamental wrongness and obligation. In the present section we have proved once for all, that what is wrong philosophically, or is philo- sophically a duty, is the same also theologically. Thus the initial and fundamental obligation is transformed into an obligation formal and complete. Therefore, hereafter we shall be content to have established the philosophical obligation, knowing that the theological side is invariably conjoined therewith. As St. Thomas says (la 2ae, q. 71, art. 6, ad 5) : " By theologians sin is considered principally as it is an offence against God : but by the moral philosopher, inasmuch as it is contrary to reason." But what is contrary to reason offends God, and is forbidden by Divine law, and thus becomes a sin. No God, no sin. Away from God, there is indecency and impropriety, unreasonableness , abomination, and brutality, all this in view of outraged humanity : there is likewise crime against the State : but the formal element of sin is wanting. With sin, of course, disappears also the punishment of sin as such. Thus to leave God wholly out of Ethics and Natural Law, is to rob moral evil of half its terrors, and of that very half which is more easily " under- standed of the people." A consideration for school- managers. Readings, — St. Thos., la, q. 22, art. 2, in corp. (against Lucretius, ii. 646 — 651) ; Suarez, De Legibus, IL, vi. nn. 3, 5—9, 13, 14, 17, 20—24. CHAPTER VII. OF THE ETERNAL LAW. I. A LAW is defined to be : A precept just and abiding, given for promulgation to a perfect com- munity. A law is primarily a rule of action. The first attribute of a law lis that it be just: just to the subject on whom it is imposed, as being no harmful abridgment of his rights : just also to other men, as not moving him to injustice against them. An unjust law is no law at all, for it is not a rule of action. Still, we may sometimes be bound, when only our own rights are infringed, to submit to such an imposition, not as a law, for it is none, but on the score of prudence, to escape direr evils. A law is no fleeting, occasional rule of conduct, suited to meet some passing emer- gency or superficial disturbance. The reason of a law lies deep down, lasting and widespread in the nature of the governed. A law, then, has these two further attributes of permanence in duration and amplitude in area. Every law is made for all time, and lives on with the life of the community for whom it is enacted, for ever, unless it be either expressly or implicitly repealed. A law in a community is like a habit in an individual, an accretion to nature, which abides as part of the natural being, and guides OF THE ETERNAL LAW. 127 henceforth the course of natural action. This analogy holds especially of those laws, which are not •enacted all of a sudden — and such are rarely the best laws — but grow upon the people with gradual growth unmarked, like a habit by the repetition of , acts, in the way of immemorial custom. I have said that a law is for a community, that it requires ampli- tude and large area. A law is not laid down for an individual, except so far as his action is of importance to the community. The private concerns of one man do not afford scope and room enough for a law. Neither do the domestic affairs of one family. A father is not a legislator. A law aims at a deep, far-reaching, primary good. But the private good of an individual, and the domestic good of a family, are not primary goods, inasmuch as the individual and the family are not primary but subordinate beings : not complete and independent, but depen- dent and partial ; not wholes but parts. The indi- vidual is part of the family, and the family is part of a higher community. It is only when we are come to some community which is not part of any higher, that we have found the being, the good of which is primary good, the aim of law. Such a community, not being part of any higher community in the same order, is in its own order a perfect community. Thus, in the temporal order, the individual is part of the State. The State is a perfect community ; and the good of the State is of more consequence than the temporal 'jvell-being of any individual citizen. The temporal good of the individual, then, is matter of law, in so far as it is subservient to the good of 128 OF THE ETERNAL LAW. the State. We have, then, to hold that a law is given to the members of a perfect community for the good of the whole. Not every precept, therefore, is a law : nor every superior a lawgiver : for it is not every superior that has charge of the good of a perfect community. Many a precept is given to an individual, either for his private good, as when a father commands his child, or for the private good of him that issues the precept, as when a master commands a servant. But every law is a precept : for a law is an imperative rule of action, in view of a good that is necessary, at least with the necessity of convenience. To every law there are counsels attached. A law may be said to be a nucleus of pre- cept, having an envelope of counsel. Every law has also a pendent called punishment for those who break it : this is called the sanction of the law. A law is also for promulgation, as a birch rod for application. The promulgation, or application, brings the law home to the subject, but is not part of the law itself. So much for the definition of Law. 2. We have to learn to look upon the whole created universe and the fulness thereof, angels, men, earth, sun, planets, fixed stars, all things visible and invisible, as one great and perfect community, whose King and Lawgiver is God. He is King, because He is Creator and Lord. But lordship and kingship are different things, even in God. It is one thing to be lord and master, owner and proprietor of a chattel, property and domain : it is another thing to be king and governor, lawgiver and judge of political subjects. The former is called power of OF THE ETERNAL LAW. 129 dominion, or right of ownership, the latter is power of jurisdiction. Power of dominion is for the good of him who wields it : but power of jurisdiction is for the good of the governed. As God is Lord of the universe, He directs all its operations to His own glory. As He is King,' He governs as a king should govern, for the good of His subjects. In intellectual creatures, whose will is not set in opposition to God, the subject's good and the glory of the Lord finally coincide. God's power of dominion is the concern of theologians : the moralist is taken up with His power of jurisdiction, from whence emanates the moral law. 3. In the last chapter (s. ii., nn. g, 10), we stated the moral law in these terms, that God wills to bind His creatures to certain lines of action, not arbitrary lines, as we saw, but the natural lines of each creature's being. The law thus stated takes in manifestly a wider field than that of moral action ► There is, in fact, no action of created things that is not comprehended under this statement. It com- prises the laws of physical nature and the action of physical causes, no less than the moral law and human acts. It is the one primeval law of the universe, antecedent to all actual creation, and co- eternal with God. And yet, not necessary as God : for had God not decreed from all eternity to create — and He need not have decreed it — neither would He have passed in His own Divine Mind this second decree, necessarily consequent as it is upon the decree of creation, namely, that every creature should act in the mode of action proper to its kind* J I30 OF THE ETERNAL LAW. This decree, supervening from eternity upon the creative decree, is called the Eternal Law. 4. This law does not govern the acts of God Himself. God ever does what is wise and good, not because He binds Himself by the decree of His own will so to act, but because of His all-perfect nature. His own decrees have not for Him the force of a precept : that is impossible in any case : yet He cannot act against them, as His nature allows not of irresolution, change of mind, and inconsistency. 5. Emanating from the will of God, and resting upon the nature of the creature, it would seem that the Eternal Law must be irresistible. " Who resisteth His will ? " asks the Apostle (Rom. ix. ig). "The streams of sacred rivers are flowing upwards, and justice and the universal order is wrenched back" (Euripides, Medea, 499). It is only the per- version spoken of by the poet, that can anywise supply the instance asked for by the Apostle. The thing is impossible in the physical order. The rivers cannot flow upwards, under the conditions under which rivers usually flow : but justice and purity, truth and religion may be wrenched back, in violation of nature and of the law eternal. The one thing that breaks this law is sin. Sin alone is pro- perly unnatural. The world is full of physical evils, pain, famine, blindness, disease, decay and death. But herein is nothing against nature : the several agents act up to their nature, so far as it goes : it is the defect of nature that makes the evil. But sin is no mere shortcoming : it is a turning round and going against nature, as though the July sun should OF THE ETERNAL LAW. 131 freeze a man, or the summer air suffocate him. Physical evil comes by the defect of nature, and by permission of the Eternal Law. But the moral evil of sin is a breach of that law. 6. A great point with modern thinkers is the inviolability of the laws of physical nature, e.g. of gravitation or of electrical induction. If these laws are represented, as J. S. Mill said they should be, as tendencies only, they are truly inviolable. The law of gravitation is equally fulfilled in a falling body, in a body suspended by a string, and in a body borne up by the ministry of an angel. There is no law of nature to the effect that a supernatural force shall never intervene. Even if, as may be done perhaps in the greatest miracles, God suspends His con- currence, so that the creature acts not at all, even that would be no violation of the physical law of the creature's action : for all that such a law provides is, that the creature, if it acts at all, shall act in a certain way, not that God shall always give the con- currence which is the necessary condition of its acting at all. The laws of physical nature, then, are, strictly speaking, never violated, although the course of nature is occasionally altered by super- natural interference, and continually by free human volition. But the laws of physical nature, in the highest generahty, are identified with the moral law. The one Eternal Law embraces all the laws of creation. It has a physical and a moral side. On the former it effects, on the latter it obliges, but on both sides it is imperative ; and though in moral matters it be temporarily defeated by sin, still the 132 OF THE ETERNAL LAW. moral behest must in the end be fulfilled as surely as the physical behest. The defeat of the law must be made good, the sin must be punished. Of the Eternal Law working itself out in the form of punish- ment, we shall speak presently. 7. It is important to hold this conception of the Eternal Law as embracing physical nature along with rational agents. To confine the law, as modern writers do, to rational agents alone, is sadly to abridge the view of its binding force. The rigid application of physical laws is brought home to us daily by science and by experience : it is a point gained, to come to understand that the moral law, being ultimately one with those physical laws, is no less absolute and indefeasible, though in a different manner, than they. It is hard for us to conceive of laws being given to senseless things. We cannot ourselves prescribe to iron or to sulphur the manner of its action. As Bacon says {Novum Organunij i., Aphorism 4) : " Man can only put natural bodies together or asunder : nature does the rest within." That is, man cannot make the laws of nature : he can only arrange collo- cations of materials so as to avail himself of those laws. But God rnakes the law, issuing His com- mand, the warrant without which no creature could do anything, that every creature, rational and irrational, shall act each according to its kind or nature. Such is the Eternal Law. Readings. — Suarez, De Legibus, I., xii. ; St. Thos., la ise, q. go, art. 2 — 4 ; ib. q. 91, art. i, in Corp., ad i ; ib. q. 93, art. i, in corp. ; ib. q. 93, art. 4, in corp.; ORIGIN OF PRIMARY MORAL JUDGMENTS. 133 ib. q. 93, art. 5, in corp. ; ib. q. 93, art. 6, in corp. ; Suarez, De Legibus, 11. , vi.; Cicero, De Legibm, II., iv. ; id., De Republica, iii. 22. CHAPTER VIII. OF THE NATURAL LAW OF CONSCIENCE. Section I. — Of the Origin of Primary Moral Judgments, I. It is an axiom of the schools, that whatever is received, is received according to the manner of the recipient. We have spoken of the law that governs the world, as that law has existed from eternity in the mind of God. We have now to con- sider that law as it is received in creatures, and becomes the inward determinant of their action. Action is either necessary or free. The great multi- tude of creatures are wholly necessary agents. Even in free agents, most of what is in them, and much that proceeds from them, is of necessity, and beyond the control of their will. Of necessary action, whether material or mental, we shall have nothing further to say. It is governed by the Eternal Law, but it is not matter of moral philosophy. Hence- forth we have to do with that law, only as it is received in free agents, as such, to be the rule of their conduct. The agents being free, the law must be received in a manner consonant with their free- dom. It is proper to a free and rational being to guide itself, not to be dragged or pushed, but to 134 OF THE NATURAL LAW OF CONSCIENCE. go its own way, yet not arbitrarily, but according to law. The law for such a creature must be, not a physical determinant of its action, but a law operating in the manner of a motive to the will, obliging and binding, yet not constraining it : a law written in the intellect after the manner of know- ledge : a law within the mind and consciousness of • the creature, whereby it shall measure and regulate ^its own behaviour. This is the natural law of con- science. It is the Eternal Law, as made known to the rational creature, whereby to measure its own free acts. The Eternal Law is in the Mind of God : the Natural Law in the minds of men and angels. The Eternal Law adjusts all the operations of creatures : the Natural Law, only the free acts of intellectual creatures. And yet, for binding force, the Natural Law is one with the Eternal Law. On a summer evening one observes the sunset on the west coast ; the heavens are all aglow with the sun shining there, and the waters are aglow too, reflect- ing the sun's rays. The Eternal Law is as the sun there in the heavens, the Natural Law is like the reflection in the sea. But it is one light. 2. It is called the Natural Law, first, because it is found, more or less perfectly expressed, in all rational beings : now whatever is found in all the individuals of a kind, is taken to belong to the specific nature^ or type of that kind. Again it is called the Natural Law, because it is a thing which any rational nature must necessarily compass and contain within itself in order to arrive at its own proper perfection and maturity. Thus this inner law is natural, in ORIGIN OF PRIMARY MORAL JUDGMENTS. 135 the sense in which walking, speech, civilization are natural to man. A man who has it not, is below the standard of his species. It will be seen that dancing, singing — at least to a pitch of professional excellence — and a knowledge of Greek, are not, in this sense, natural. The Natural Law is not natural, in the sense of " coming natural," as provincial people say, or coming to be in man quite irrespectively of train- ing and education, as comes the power of breathing. It was absurd of Paley {Mor.PhiL, bk. i., c. v.) to look to the wild boy of Hanover, who had grown up in the woods by himself, to display in his person either the Natural Law or any other attribute proper to a rational creature. 3. We call this the natural law of conscience, be- cause every individual's conscience applies this law, as he understands it, to his own particular human acts, and judges of their morality accordingly. What then is conscience ? It is not a faculty, not a habit, it is an act. It is a practical judgment of the understanding. It is virtually the conclusion of a syllogism, the major premiss of which would be some general principle of command or counsel in moral matters ; the minor, a statement of fact bringing some particular case of your own conduct under that law ; and the conclusion, which is conscience, a decision of the case for yourself according to that principle : e,£'., * There is no obligation of going to church on (what Catholics call) a day of devotion : this day I am now living is only a day of devotion ; therefore I am not bound to go to church to-day.' Such is the train of thought, not always so explicitly /L- 136 OF THE NATURAL LAW OF CONSCIENCE. and formally developed, that passes through the ^~ mind, when conscience works. / It is important to remember that conscience is an act of intellect, a judgment, not on a matter of general principle, not about other people's conduct, but about my own xiction in some particular case, and the amount of moral praise or blame that I deserve, or should deserve, for it. As regards action already done, or not done, conscience testifies, accusing or excusing. As regards action contemplated, conscience restrains or prompts, in the way of either obligation or counsel. \ 4. Conscience is not infallible : it may err, like any other human judgment. A man may be blind, if not exactly to his own action, at least to the motives and circumstances of his action. He may have got hold of a wrong general principle of con- duct. He may be in error as to the application of his principle to the actual facts. In all these ways, what we may call the conscientious syllogism may be at fault, like any other syllogism. It may be a bad syllogism, either in logical form, or in the matter of ^&ctv^serted in the premisses. This is an erroneous consciendi^*^^Butj for action contemplated, even an erroneous c5n§dence is an authoritative decision. If it points to ah' obligation, however mistakenly, we are bound either to act upon the judgment or get it reversed. Weinust not contradict our own reason : sucli contradiction is moral evil (c. v., s. iii., n. 3). If conscience by mistake sets us free of what is ob- jectively our bounden duty, we are not there and then bound to that duty : but we may be bound at once to get that verdict of conscience overhauled and ORIGIN OF PRIMARY MORAL JUDGMENTS. 137 reconsidered. Conscience in this case has proceeded in ignorance, which ignorance will be either vincible or invincible, and must be treated according to the rules provided in the matter of ignorance (c. iii., s. i., nn. 3 — 5). An obligation, neglected in invincible ignorance, makes a merely material sin (c. iii., s. ii., n. 7). 5. There is another element of mind, often con- founded under one name with conscience, but distinct from it, as a habit from an act, and as principles from their application. This element the schoolmen called synderesis,^ Synderesis is an habitual hold upon primary moral judgments, as, that we must do good, avoid evil, requite benefactors, honour superiors, punish evil- doers. There is a hot controversy as to how these primary moral judgments arise in the mind. The coals of dispute are kindled by the assumption, that these moral judgments must needs have a totally other origin and birth in the mind than speculative first principles, as, that the whole is greater than the part, that two and two are four, that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another. The assumption is specious, but unfounded. It looks plausible because of this difference, that moral judg- ments have emotions to wait upon them, speculative judgments have not. Speculative judgments pass like the philosophers that write them down, unheeded in the quiet of their studies. But moral judgments • On the derivation of this word, whether from (rvtfeidria'is or ffvvT'f}pri